Day 2 of the Budget Challenge - Unexpected expenses

The day started out ok with my spending a whopping $1.50 for a large Diet Coke at the Mom's Time Out Coffee Break.  Alex and I ate PB&J sandwiches before we left so we wouldn't be tempted by the all you can eat french toast special.  The bakery owner gave all the kids free oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, so we didn't feel like we were sacrificing at all.

Then John called from the car repair shop and it all went to hell.

The car needed to be evaluated for a few hours to figure out what was wrong with it, so Alex and I drove up to get him. I figured we'd all go back home and eat grilled ham and cheese sandwiches while we waited, but John wouldn't have any of that.  He didn't want to drive all the way home just to come back in a couple of hours, so we ended up staying in the vicinity of the repair shop.  This meant we spent money. 

• First, we stopped off to pick up John's golf club that was being repaired.  Cha ching:  $30



• Then we went to a Chinese buffet for lunch:  Cha ching:  $15 plus a $3 tip because Alex made a holy mess with green jello and cheese.
  



• Still needing to kill some time, we went to the park:  FREE!



• We were two hours past Alex's nap time so I dropped John back at the repair shop to wait it out with a handful of quarters for the vending machine:  $1.50



• Car repairs and oil change totaled $100 even though we didn't get the actual problem fixed (which would have cost an additional $600!)



• Then John had to buy crab grass killer and a sprinkler for our backyard costing $17

Needless to say, yesterday was not so great with a total money spent $168

That's $218 in two days!  Good God!  John and I stayed up last night talking about our budget and how we're nickel and diming ourselves into the poorhouse.  We've racked up almost $3000 on our credit card in the last couple of months (it would take whole other post to explain why we're using a credit card and not the debit card. I will note that we are doing it as a strategy for tracking our spending NOT because we don't have cash available in the bank) and have not made a single purchase over $100.  Everything is $20, $30, $40... When we're spending the money, we're thinking it's not that much, but it adds up.  It adds up to $2700 to be exact!

This revelation has made us more motivated than ever in the Budget Challenge.  We've estimated that if we stay on track, we'll be able to pay off almost the entire balance on that credit card at the end of the week.  So that's what we're doing.  Of course living debt free will only last a short while because we still have the $600 car repairs that we will probably take care of next week.  But we can take solace in the fact that it is a necessary expense.